"Heisman Finalist or Bench Warmer?"

Introduction
Another year, another college football game. Nowadays, EA Sports has the exclusive rights to making football games using the NCAA, its teams, and everything that goes along with it. That means only one college football video game anymore compared to other years. Will this lack of competition dull down EA's NCAA Football series or otherwise? Let's find out!

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Gameplay: 8/10

The most important thing in any video game, obviously -- how does it play? Well, it plays like any typical title in the line of EA's NCAA Football series. You display your skills on the gridiron to try and continue to catapult your school's team to greatness! It handles fairly fluently. There are a few plays that are botched up by design; therefore, being unusable (especially the RB Read plays from last year's version -- still not fixed). Other than that, there are very few to little slowdowns, though they do happen. Rarely though. Other things such as how the passing or running game works or how tough the defense is will be handled in the "Difficulty" section of this review. That about it, but...

Also this year is the addition of the "Race For The Heisman" feature. In this mode, you are able to guide a created player and follow him from fresh out of high school and trying out for scholarships, to graduation where you can decide to go pro and export your player to EA Sports's Madden NFL 2006 or stay in the college ranks, proceed to Dynasty mode, and become a college football coach.

This has its ups and downs. Compared to traditional play, in this mode you have to worry about playing good. You need to rack up the stats, not to mention have a good initial tryout for a scholarship, if you want to win the Heisman trophy. Winning that makes you a "legend" at your school, and allows you to export your player to Madden '06 to continue his career. Otherwise, you'll be forced to become a coach upon graduation. This means that more focus will be on getting those stats needed to win the trophy rather than fully focused on winning football games. On the flip side, it's pretty cool to follow the career, closely, of your created player. Especially when Madden comes out and you're able to export him to that game via a Playstation 2 Memory Card.

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Controls: 9/10

Controls are vital. The ability to control a game gone awry means a game itself gone awry. (I'll be covering PS2 controls here.) I'd say the controls have improved greatly. Especially considering one vital difference when it comes to controlling defensive players. In the past, the "X" button used to switch between players while the "Circle" button used to be the speed burst on defense. Now it has finally changed around. This means that no matter what, the "X" button will be speed burst on both sides of the ball.

Also with the passing game, there are a few minor/major changes. In the past, to scramble you needed to turn off the passing symbols with the "L2" button. That's changed now. All you have to do now is press the "X" button to scramble as a quarterback. The downside to this is that the "L2" button has become the new "throw the ball away" button. This can result in a lot of intentional grounding penalties for those used to the classic design.

Finally of note is the running game. The juke motions have been moved to the "R" joystick while the "L1" and "R1" buttons are now used for left stiff-arm and right stiff-arm, respectively. This may seem a bit awkward at first, but it is a great improvement for the running game, especially with the addition with the sudden-stop juke and finally being able to protect the button. This can be achieved by pressing the "R" joystick down or up, respectively again, while running with the ball.

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Difficulty: 6/10

In this section we will cover everything concerning difficulty sliders, penalty sliders, and default difficulty settings.

The NCAA line of games is typically "unplayable" to a veteran football video-gamer straight out of the box. For the casual gamer, it runs just fine though. "Junior Varsity" being the easiest, followed by the standard "Varsity" difficulty, then the respectable "All-American" difficulty setting, with the "Heisman" setting taking the cake for most difficult. These are all great settings for the casual gamer to play with and to progress their way up to more and more difficult settings for a greater challenge.

The problem comes for the veteran gamers or the obsessive-compulsive gamers when it comes to realistic-ness. In last year's version, the defense got a huge boost. In specific, establishing a passing game was next to impossible without tweaking the settings a bit on the higher difficulty settings. This year is quite the opposite. Offense is the name of the game. The deep bombs are back. But of greater concern is the running game, which has gotten a HUGE boost compared to other years. Establishing a running game is relatively easy now. The difficulty sliders will definitely be needed to be tweaked with this year as far as that goes. If you can stand going through 5 or 6 games, you can get a feel for what needs to be tweaked around with and you can fix it up eventually.

Also of personal note are penalties -- in specific the facemask penalties. They seem to be happening a lot more than usual this year, and I had to tweak that down significantly. As with the difficulty sliders, play a few games and you will get a feel for which penalties need to be boosted up and which need to be tapered down a bit.

All in all though, this year's game is quite playable for everyone, but for the veteran gamer, it may need significant tweaking with sliders.

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Graphics: 8/10

Graphics aren't really important, but what would a review be without a graphics rating!? The visual appeal of the in-game atmosphere hasn't really changed that much from last year. May be a bit sharper. There are some new tackling/tackled animations though which is nice. Also there are some nice animations for stiff-arming that they added.

Also, this year they added a visual presentation of Brad Nessler, Kirk Herbstreit, and Lee Corso up in the booth overlooking the field prior to the game. It's really quite short, but it's a nice addition. Corso also does his usual "mascot headgear" selections just like on ESPN's College Gameday. For any teams that don't have a mascot, there is a helmet that he wears.

Other than that, the overall presentation/layout is very nice as usual. You'll get all the bells and whistles, and if you like that sort of thing, then you'll really like the presentation in the menus. Some team logos have gotten face-lifts/updated to more current style logos. Also, of small personal note, the faces look a lot better on the players, coaches, referees, and cheerleaders

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Sound: 6/10

So, this year EA added an "EA Trax" to the game. For those who always wanted to "Madden-ize" your NCAA game, this is your year. For all the rest of us who liked the traditional college fight songs playing in the menus -- good news, there's an option to change the audio between fight songs and "EA Trax".

The only other thing really worth mentioning in here is the all-important commentary by the terrific trio: Brad Nessler, Kirk Herbstreit, and Lee Corso. You will hear many recycled lines from past years which most likely will make your stomach turn at times. Still, they added a few new lines to the commentary which is nice. Don't rely on it being new and refreshing though. You'll get disappointed.

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Replayability: 8/10

If you like football -- if you like college football -- you'll be playing this for hours and hours. Dynasty mode alone, the pride and joy of the NCAA Football series, will provide you with a very large amount of play time as you, a college football coach, work your way to getting you team to be a perennial contender for the national championship. You can get contracts with various schools to help out their program reach the top of their division, conference, or the top of college football itself. Recruit players, even during the season now and invite them to the campus during a home game weekend to lure them to your school.

The "Race For The Heisman" mode will also provide significant play time, even in conjunction with Dynasty mode. Take your graduated created player and go into the coaching ranks and take the reins of a team to guide it to victory. Or, if you win the Heisman trophy and become a legend at your school, opt to declare yourself for the pro draft and export your player to Madden when that comes out in August 2005.

Again, if you like football, and you like playing it as a video game, you'll be playing this until next year's game comes out.

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Overall: 8/10

All in all, NCAA Football 2006 is a solid football game. For the casual gamer, you can pick this up right away and enjoy it for hours and hours! For the veteran football gamer, after a few finely-tuned tweaks in the sliders, you'll be right back up to speed from last year. So EA is still giving a good effort in these games despite the exclusive license of the NCAA. I highly recommend this game for anyone who likes football, for the veteran players of the series, and for any casual gamer wishing to try out a college football game.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/18/05